During the 1983 Royal Tour of New Zealand by Prince Charles, Diana Princess of Wales and their infant son William, Dun Mihaka achieved international notoriety by performing a “whakapohane i te tou” (baring of the buttocks) in front of the Royal limousine as it exited Wellington Airport. He was immediately arrested following his protest. The brutality of the arrest (two police officers forced him to the ground) provoked his confidante and wife, Diane Prince, to attack the police, and she herself was taken into custody. This book is essentially the story of the resulting trial. The authors have left us with a superb example of how to present a political trial; they effectively put the whole system – police, courts, media, politicians and the Monarchy itself – on trial.

Conducting his own defence, Mihaka displays a refreshing lack of deference to judges and police officer witnesses. He sets out the purpose of the book thus: “if we hadn’t have done it [the protest], we would not have been able to bring you this blow by blow account of why it was done, the profound historical, cultural and social implications of the act itself, and the reasons why the monocultural system of justice that we have in N.Z. is completely incapable of fairly determining the criminality of any issue of another national culture. In fact the act itself is as native to Aotearoa as the Kauri is, as the system that inevitably ruled it to be criminally offensive and the Oak are native to England.” (p.15)